Aisanglish

Fairtex Muay Thai Camp, Bangkok, Thailand

 

two random observations that i forgot to include earlier:

 

The other day, when conversing with a local, my friend Alex was like "why the hell are you talking like that?"  What he detected was my, by now, finely honed, Asianglish.  In which I speak with exaggerated thai-ish pronunciations of words and simplyify my grammar often omitting articles, verbs, tenses etc. So the question "So, have you lived in chiang mai for a while?" becomes "So yoU live chiang mai long time ?'  While it sounds like a patronizing westerner talking down to people, I've found it really helps in communication (and it makes sense, as much of  Asian language grammar does away with subject verb agreement, tenses, articles, etc.). So as a consequence I've gotten quite good at it and now do it subconsciously. So I'm worried when I step out of JFK in a few weeks I'll tell the cab driver "I go 49 street yes?"  without even thinking of it.  Actually come to think of it, that will probably be work with NYC cab drivers, so never mind.

 

Another thing that is grown to absurd proportions is the Peninsula/Mandarin Oriental hotel rivalry.  As the two premier far eastern luxury hotel brands, and arguably the two finest brands in the world, they brawl like drunken tuk-tuk drivers on each others home turf.  Example, in Bangkok, the Oriental has it's home base, with the first Oriental hotel ever built, old and famous and the home of guys like Somerset Maugham and Joseph Conrad in the old days.  So obviously, it's tough for the Pen to compete with this type of tradition, so they went the other way, and build a massive 40 story behemoth of a building on the opposite bank of the Chao Phraya that  dominates the views of anybody on the river side of the Oriental.  They both have flotillas of identical looking, yet dueling luxury motor launches that seem to try to ram each other shuttling passengers across the river.  One has a fleet of custom BMW's, the other has a fleet of custom Benzes, etc etc etc.  Not that I'm bitching about any of this, but seriously, those of us who travel in the Princess' private speedboat require a bit more decorum.  I think a duel might be in order, or a muay thai fight.